YouTube Strips Billions of Video Views from Major Record Labels

The world’s largest recording companies have been stripped of nearly two billion YouTube video views after the site cracked down on alleged “fake viewers.” Universal took the biggest loss, being stripped of one billion views spread throughout artists such as Rihanna, Kanye West, Nicki Minaj, Justin Bieber and many more. Serving as the biggest crackdown on artificially inflated figures for the video streaming site, YouTube also wiped out 850 million views from artists signed to Sony’s record label. With online services available to help users fabricate viral statistics such as YouTube views, Facebook friends and Twitter followers for a fee, YouTube looks to reinforce their view count policy to help improve its site. Being that labels and artists are able to make significant profits from advertisements through various social media outlets, this could lead to additional websites making better efforts to clean up their sites as well.